A Night To Remember – Walter Lord, 1955 ★★★★

Disaster by Degrees

When the Titanic sank and took some 1,500 souls with her in April 1912, minds reeled at the enormity of the disaster. Some sought religious consolation. Others took pride in the behavior of those who perished, many of whom fell into the category of what we now call elites.

Facing icy extinction, it was said these elites behaved with singular aplomb. By calmly allowing women and children to board the all-too-few lifeboats first, these first-class passengers were a credit to themselves and their order.

Diamonds Are Forever – Ian Fleming, 1956 ★½

Travelogue in Search of a Plot

Ian Fleming was a brilliant travel writer, but he had to contort his travelogues into spy stories to get anyone to pay attention. Nowhere is this case better made than in Diamonds Are Forever.

This fourth installment in the James Bond series puts Bond on the trail of a diamond-smuggling operation, hopping from England to the Eastern United States to the Western United States to what was then still French Guinea in pursuit of gangsters and their fetching gem moll, Tiffany Case.

Wordsworth – Selected by W. E. Williams, 1950 ★★

Biting Off More than I Can Chew

Reading William Wordsworth became a most challenging reading assignment. If enjoyment was my objective, I failed miserably.

He’s technically brilliant and his words are full of joy. His lyricism, his rhyme schemes, his ability to effortlessly conjure up scenes of awesome beauty – he had talent and vision to spare. His short poems feel weirdly effortless in their genius, their Poe-like flow, and simple eloquence.

Hoover's FBI: The Inside Story By Hoover's Trusted Lieutenant – Cartha D. "Deke" DeLoach, 1995 ★★

Sympathy for J. Edgar

J. Edgar Hoover, civil libertarian? According to one of his top aides, yes.

For a time in the 1960s, Cartha DeLoach was the third-ranking executive in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Bureau’s point man with the White House. Watching his boss dicker with President Lyndon B. Johnson on what the FBI could and couldn’t do under the Constitution was for DeLoach both instructive and edifying:

Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens, 1838-39 ★★½

Great Characters, But a Bit of a Mess

Everything that’s right – and wrong – about early Charles Dickens comes to roost in his third novel, less celebrated now but as popular then as anything he wrote. If Nicholas Nickleby often misses the mark for today’s reader, that speaks more to time’s passage than lack of talent.

A big takeaway from reading Nicholas Nickleby, far more than its story or characters: Dickens’s boundless imagination.

Explorers On The Moon – Hergé, 1952-1954 ★★★★

Fantasy Becomes Prophesy

The fantastical aspect of Explorers On The Moon is not what Hergé did with his extraterrestrial adventure, but what he didn’t do.

No moon men. No cities hidden beneath lunar craters. No princess kidnapped by green-skinned space pirates from John Carter’s Mars.

No, Hergé plays it straight. The result: more of a mind flip now than some cosmic fairy tale would have been then, as he pretty much nails what a moon flight entails before anyone ever went and did it.

Destination Moon – Hergé, 1950-1953 ★★★

A Small Step to a Giant Leap

Nobody ever watched Star Wars to see Luke Skywalker fix moisture vaporizers. Nor do they want an entire movie of Clark Kent hunting for phone booths. What to make of a Tintin story that amounts to set-up for a boffo coming attraction?

Destination Moon still works fine. While the story itself is kind of static and anticipatory, the vision and craft of creator Hergé and his growing team of skilled collaborators are on vibrant display. You expect lush visuals and lovely details, and you get those, but something else, too: Real-world verisimilitude in comic form.

Bury Me In A Pot Bunker – Pete Dye with Mark Shaw, 1995 [Revised 1999] ★★

Golf's Bogeyman Looks Back

Resentment is the price many incur for being forward-thinking. This is true as well when designing golf courses.

When Pete Dye oversaw the opening of his Harbour Town Golf Links in South Carolina in time to host a 1969 PGA Tour event, tournament participants were apoplectic. Greens were much too small. Bunkers were much too large. Trees were everywhere.

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – James Joyce, 1916 ★★★½

A Portrait of Many Parts

There were times reading A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man where I was convinced that this was not only a great novel, but the greatest ever written in the whole history of mankind.

Other times, I felt it wasn’t even very good.

Still, consider this not only an appreciation of a literary cornerstone, but a recommendation. A Portrait Of The Artist is well worth your time. Just be aware that it goes on some wide tangents and gets a bit preachy.

Grace And Power – Sally Bedell Smith, 2004 ★★½

Love, American Style

Power couples are formidable when seen from the outside; the realities of any romance built around image concerns and status enhancement are more complicated. Take the glamorous Jackie Kennedy and her husband, the 35^th President of the United States.

As explained by Sally Bedell Smith, it was a bond complicated by Jack Kennedy’s needs to lead a nation and squeeze in as much extramarital sex as possible. Jackie’s job was to support her husband through his travails and ignore his myriad infidelities as best she could.

The Body In The Library – Agatha Christie, 1942 ★★★

Murder Most Cozy

When you read a book that helped spawn an entire subgenre, you tend to look for signs of aborning fecundity.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is to cozy mysteries what James Bond is to spy fiction: The first name that springs to mind when discussing the genre. Think murder in a quiet town, a dash of elegant humor and no big emotions, and you think Marple.

Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall – Spike Milligan, 1971 ★★½

Goon Goes to War

There’s nothing so tragic that laughter can’t be mined from it. Not even World War II.

Of course, a lot depends on who is doing the mining.

Back in the 1950s, Spike Milligan redefined comedy in Great Britain as a performer and lead writer on radio’s “The Goon Show.” Before all that, in 1940, Milligan took time out of his young life to help beat back the Nazi war machine, as a draftee in an artillery regiment.

King Edward III – William Shakespeare & others, c. 1594 ★★½

Making a Case for Number 39

William Shakespeare is commonly credited with having written 38 plays, many if not most regarded as classics to this day. Why not make room for another?

The answer is an easy no if the play is not up to the standard one expects from the Bard of Avon. Much of the time this patriotism pageant unspools, the result is uneven, as more sensitive members of academia put it. But then you find yourself catching sparks of true genius and wit that, if not exclusive to Shakespeare, ring with his singular voice.

Did Shakespeare lend a hand? The evidence suggests a qualified yes.

Land Of Black Gold – Hergé, 1939-1940/1948-1950 [Revised 1971] ★★★★

Worth the Wait

How much can you expect from a Tintin book that took five calendar decades to reach us in its final form? Logically not a lot, but logic has a way of being happily ignored in the world of Tintin.

Such is the case for Land Of Black Gold, at least for me.

How Life Imitates The World Series – Thomas Boswell, 1982 ★★★½

Dealing Out Poetry and Hard Slides

Baseball lends itself to two kinds of writing styles, lyrical and analytical. Thomas Boswell is a rare baseball writer who pulls off both with equal finesse.

Whether writing about stars or taking in the sport’s appeal to all ages, Boswell waxes poetic and, at times, sentimental about the communal power of the game, its power to simultaneously apotheosize and humanize its actors. But before those Ken Burns violins get going, Boswell throws in a zinger or one-liner to make clear he’s no sap.

Love Among The Ruins: A Romance Of The Near Future – Evelyn Waugh, 1953 ★★½

The Future is on Fire

World War II ended in Allied victory, but in its aftermath Evelyn Waugh still heard the toll of doom. Love Among The Ruins presents a future without faith, hope, or love, only the State.

Even 1984 gave readers a rooting interest. Here you get an arsonist.

Drifter's Vengeance – Max Brand, 1973 [1932] ★½

Playing with Western Conventions

Think “western fiction” and many ideas spring to mind.

Not all are flattering. With an emphasis on action, westerns cater to shorter attention spans. Action is emphasized, dialogue spare. Even more than other genres, plots conform to expected formulas. Outcomes are simpler, too: Even revisionist westerns are tough on bad guys.

The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years Of His Motion Pictures – Donald Spoto, 1992 ★★

Sometimes a Bird Is Just a Bird

In the world of film criticism, few directors present target-rich environments like Alfred Hitchcock. You can delve into the stories behind his movies; the often-disturbing if genial persona he crafted both in front of and behind the lens; the evolution of his craft; the signature devices that established a film as distinctly his own.

Or you can do what Donald Spoto does here and point out all the symbolism until you’ve turned some of cinema’s greatest touchstones into amoebas in a microscope.

"Captains Courageous" – Rudyard Kipling, 1897 ★½

Fish Story Gets Away

The first thing that threw me about this novel when I encountered it as a boy was the title.

Glancing at it, I expected something like the Three Musketeers at sea. It was billed as an adventure tale. Author Rudyard Kipling was known for his war stories, often set in India. How could I have known it was a story about a youngster learning how to become a man by…catching fish?

The Zimmermann Telegram – Barbara Tuchman, 1958 ★★★

A Man, a Plan, a Telegram

The plan seemed perfect in its simplicity: Take out a prospective enemy in the middle of a global war without moving a single soldier or ship. What could go wrong?

For Imperial Germany in 1916, quite a lot. For the prospective enemy was the United States, the conflict World War I, and the plan used would prove just the lever to move a peace-loving American president to join in the carnage as an ally of Germany’s foes.

Prisoners Of The Sun – Hergé, 1946-49 ★★

Tintin's Most Overrated Adventure?

Sweeping vistas of the snow-capped Andes. Realistic depictions of ancient Incan architecture and every kind of South American animal you can imagine, from bullish tapirs to ornery llamas. Crypt-like hideaways tucked behind imposing waterfalls.

Prisoners Of The Sun boasts all this splendor and more. Graphically, it is a stepping-up point for “The Adventures Of Tintin” the same way The Blue Lotus had been back when the series was just getting started. Storywise, though, author Hergé is content to put Tintin and his buddies through the motions. That could just be my take, as Prisoners is one of the best-regarded of Tintin books.

The Seven Crystal Balls – Hergé, 1943-48 ★★★

Tintin’s Weird Tale

If any installment of the Tintin series had a right to flop, it was this. While author Hergé was writing it, he found himself suddenly unemployed and arrested for Nazi collaboration. Overnight, he went from pop star to criminal. Also, his mother died.

But The Seven Crystal Balls did not flop; just the opposite. It could be argued the book was the best thing to happen not only to “The Adventures Of Tintin” but Franco-Belgian comics; it helped launch a magazine under the “Tintin” banner that became the mothership for a bevy of comic artists and opened a door for Edgar P. Jacobs, a Hergé collaborator who, after his uncredited co-write here, launched his own milestone franchise, “Blake And Mortimer.”

The Father – August Strindberg, 1887 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★½

Throwing Away the Envelope

What would a battle of the sexes look like if participants were less motivated by sexual desire and more by Nietzschean will to power? The Father sets the struggle of man versus woman, or rather husband versus wife, in exactly that context.

Whether the play is valid, illuminating, or entertaining as presented is a different question. I didn’t find it so, but I was born a century after the intended audience. They found this drama convincing enough to help lift its author, August Strindberg, to international fame.

Vanishing Ladies – Ed McBain, 1957 ★★½

Stranger Danger in the Sticks

Pulp fiction is a genre famous for keeping it short. Wham-bam openings; terse dialogue; jump-in action sequences; swift resolutions: What you get is meant to be read fast and enjoyed at once.

Vanishing Ladies presents a baseline example of the genre, with many recognizable staples in place. One variation: the protagonist is a cop, not a private eye or regular joe, which makes sense given author Ed McBain had just launched his 87^th Precinct series of police procedurals the year before publishing this.

Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy, 1874 ★★★½

The Perils of Gaslighting

When a pretty woman flirts with a middle-aged man, you might expect annoyance when he discovers she’s having him on. You don’t expect carnage, which is what happens in this pastoral romantic tragicomedy by Thomas Hardy, Victorian fiction’s master of disaster.

The second of Hardy’s celebrated run of “Wessex” novels, Far From The Madding Crowd details the calamitous romantic history of Bathsheba Everdene, inheritor of a substantial farm in her early twenties who sends a prank valentine to a bachelor named Boldwood who owns the neighboring spread.

The Secret Life Of Walter Winchell – Lyle Stuart, 1953 ★½

Takes One to Know One

What is it like to witness one of history’s most lurid practitioners of below-the-belt gossip-mongering getting served with the same treatment?

Like Walter Winchell, the target of our book, this 1953 hit job is brassy, bitchy, and hard to put down. Once you do, alas, it’s easy to forget.

Moonraker – Ian Fleming, 1955 ★★

No Nukes, No Nookie

Which makes the bigger splash in a James Bond story: A nuclear explosion or a Bond girl that just says no to sex with 007? Moonraker gives you the chance to find out.

As a reading experience, Ian Fleming delivers some marvelous prose; the early glimpses of Bond’s everyday life deepen my appreciation for the character and his world. As a novel, it is one of the weakest Fleming Bond stories; a ridiculous scheme, contrivances galore, and a sloppy, rushed ending.

Killing Reagan – Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard, 2015 ★★

He Did It for Jodie

How does one write about a murdering a person where the victim, a U. S. President, lives on for a quarter-century?

If you are producing a lucrative series of books with a running title like Killing So-and-so, you find a way of tying that person’s eventual demise to the murder attempt. That is what Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard did in the case of Ronald Reagan, who went down in history not as a victim of an assassin’s bullet but instead Alzheimer’s disease.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend – Laura Hillenbrand, 2001 ★★★★

Somebody Bet on the Bay

First-time author Laura Hillenbrand put on a master class in popular-history writing with this improbable tale of an ungainly little red racehorse that could.

Luminously written, with deep appreciation for the culture of the racetrack and the colorful personalities that lived and died around it, Seabiscuit is the sort of history book that not only edifies and entertains but asks us to ponder how amazing a thing life can be.

Red Rackham's Treasure – Hergé, 1943-44 ★★★

Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man

You’ve spent the last year pursuing bad guys, getting knocked out and kidnapped, escaping, dodging an attack dog, and putting aside whatever it is you supposedly do for a living. Now it’s time to collect your reward: Some old guy who can’t make out a word you say.

At least there’s quality time on a tropical island. Look out for sharks!

The Secret Of The Unicorn – Hergé, 1942-43 ★★★½

Embarking on a Model Mystery

There is nothing as satisfying as a long-running adventure series settling into full hum. That’s exactly what you get with The Secret Of The Unicorn, 11^th installment of “The Adventures Of Tintin.”

Our hero is now completely established in his signature role of adventurer-detective, “a real Sherlock Holmes” as his dog-buddy Snowy dubs him. His new best friend Captain Haddock gets his biggest part yet, a double role in fact.

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller, 1961 ★½

The Catch Was I Didn’t Care

They say war is hell; maybe it just gets bad press. Catch-22 performs the feat of devising an alternate World War II even worse than the real one.

Catch-22 isn’t a novel anymore. It isn’t a movie or a miniseries, either. It’s a phrase, a catchphrase if you will, often used by people who never read the book. Many may not realize there even is a book.

Miss Julie – August Strindberg, 1888 [Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge] ★★★½

Cupid Is a Ruthless Hunter

Love is nice, but what really counts in this life is power. That cold lesson is transformed into a classic play about what happens when a servant gets too involved with the mistress of the house.

If there is an anti-Ibsen when it comes to preaching the gospels of naturalism and humanism in 19^th-century drama, it is his near-countryman August Strindberg, an ornery Swede who sneered at audiences and critics discoursing upon mankind’s hopeless condition.

The River War: An Account Of The Reconquest Of The Sudan [Second Edition] – Winston Churchill, 1902 ★★★

Vying for the Nile

History’s ability to keep on repeating itself is frightening. Settling down to read Winston Churchill’s second book, an episode of colonial ambition along the Nile at the end of the 1800s, one expects dusty Victorian drama under the palms. What one gets instead is a sneak preview of the 21^st Century, equal parts western adventurism and Arab unrest.

The Alienist – Caleb Carr, 1994 ★½

Murder and Psychiatry at the Turn of the Century

Welcome to 1896. The art of police investigation means knowing how much to club a suspect until he talks. Moving through Manhattan boulevards requires a keen eye for pools of urine and horse manure. Psychiatrists are so sinister in the public consciousness they are known as “alienists” and regarded with fear and loathing.

It is a bleak and dangerous time, even more so when New York City discovers its own version of London’s Jack the Ripper on the loose.

Gone Hollywood: The Movie Colony In The Golden Age – Christopher Finch & Linda Rosenkrantz, 1979 ★★★

Everybody Is a Star

Today a second-hand venue for comic-book characters and television comedians, movies once dominated western culture. Gone Hollywood offers a look back to Tinseltown in its Golden Age.

The 1930s and 1940s were a legendary time to work in Hollywood. While the world reeled from war and depression, a few square miles of California offered an imagined oasis of escape. Too good to be true, it was an illusion that endured for a long time, buttressed by easy money and a friendly press.

The Other – Thomas Tryon, 1971 ★★★

Tranquility Meets Terror 

Back in 1971, The Other was destination fiction for scare aficionados, a macabre tale with a surprise or two to spring on the reader. A popular and critical success, it twisted many young minds.

Since then, the horror genre has changed a lot, thanks to a guy named King, sexy vampires, and hordes of undead. The Other stands apart with its fine-grain prose and prim avoidance of the supernatural. Reading it, you can’t help but feel time’s passage.

The Shooting Star – Hergé, 1941-42 ★★★½

A Touch of the Surreal

Meteors hit the earth every day, science tells us; one as large as 66 feet in diameter will land about once each century. Ten volumes in, it was high time for a big one to collide with the world of Tintin.

How does Tintin handle this cosmic crisis? With his usual doughty good humor and more than a touch of the surreal. The Shooting Star may well be one of the more out-there entries in the entire “Adventures Of Tintin” series (giant mushrooms? melting streets?) but manages a satisfying landing despite all that and more.

The Triumph & Tragedy Of Lyndon Johnson – Joseph A. Califano Jr., 1991 ★★

LBJ Agonistes

Was Lyndon Johnson both the hardest-working and unluckiest man ever to inhabit the White House? Joseph Califano would have you think so.

A senior domestic-policy aide through most of Johnson’s presidency, Califano observed the 36^th President of the United States in times sunny (reelected by 44 states and 61 percent of the popular vote in 1964) and bleak (losing in Vietnam). Let others have at the negative; Califano’s admiration for his former boss overtakes all else.

The Taming Of The Shrew – William Shakespeare, 1590-1592 ★★½

What's Askew About the Shrew?

Not every “classic” work of literature makes great reading. Sometimes a work is overrated, a little or a lot. Sometimes the text fails to connect to a particular reader. And sometimes, every once in a while, the classic label is not a function of the text itself, but rather the work’s place in our larger culture. You respect it, see its imprint, and sort of shrug.

That is my subjective take on The Taming Of The Shrew, a pleasant comedy that in my view, promises more than it delivers.

Live And Let Die – Ian Fleming, 1954 ★★★½

A Second Debut for 007

While it is the second James Bond novel, Live And Let Die feels like a kind of debut, introducing what generations of readers and movie fans expect from a James Bond adventure yarn.

The first of Ian Fleming’s novels, Casino Royale, kept Bond penned up in a single locale playing cards, not physically hurting anyone. Live And Let Die gives us a more peripatetic and lethal hero, journeying from London to Harlem to Florida and finally Jamaica and leaving a trail of death behind. 

The Abandonment Of The Jews: America And The Holocaust, 1941-1945 – David S. Wyman, 1984 ★★★

The Cavalry Took Its Time

On Sunday, August 20, 1944, 127 American heavy bombers flew over Upper Silesia in western Poland, dropping 1,336 500-pound high-explosive bombs on synthetic-oil plants fueling Germany’s war against Russia. They left alone another Nazi operation just five miles away, a murder complex at Auschwitz.

A targeted operation against Auschwitz that day could have saved tens of thousands, including 15-year-old Anne Frank, arrested in Holland earlier that same month and transported to Auschwitz in September. Instead, then and later, Americans ignored the opportunity to strike a blow for humanity, particularly Jews. According to David Wyman, this callousness characterized American strategy throughout World War II.

The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold – Evelyn Waugh, 1957 ★½

Waugh at Sea

A willingness to dish on oneself may make for a more scintillating companion; not so a better novel.

By sending up a drug- and alcohol-impaired middle-aged novelist not unlike author Evelyn Waugh himself, The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold would seem a must-read for curious Waugh fans. What better target for a master satirist than himself? But even fans will find their enthusiasm dimmed by a surprisingly lackluster protagonist and paper-thin plot. Was Waugh, like Pinfold, running on empty late in the game?

Winchell – Bob Thomas, 1971 ★★½

The Power of the Fedora

The power of the written word is an amazing thing. It transforms losers into lovers, dreamers into rock stars. Wielded a certain way, it can even morph otherwise ordinary folk into fearsome giants. Such was the case with a failed singer-dancer named Walter Winchell.

While his hoofing croaked onstage in two-a-day vaudeville houses, Winchell honed another act backstage, listening in on the gossip and goings-on of fellow players and posting his observations on the theater bulletin board to be read by all. In the 1920s, he took his gossip-hawking act to newspapers. In short order he became the most-read columnist in America: Feared, loved, hated, enjoyed, but always read.

The Crab With The Golden Claws – Hergé, 1940-41 [Revised 1943] ★★½

The Captain Comes Aboard

Positively shocking what they let children read these days. Why, here’s a comic book that revolves around narcotics trafficking, a hero who hijacks a plane and steals a car, and his new buddy a raving alcoholic. Played for laughs, no less!

What kind of people are these Belgians, anyway?

Killer's Choice – Ed McBain, 1958 ★★½

Murder Takes a Back Seat

Why does the 87^th Precinct series still draw readers in, over sixty years after it began, more than a decade after its creator’s death? Can it boil down to more than crafty plots, cocksure villains, and cagey dialogue? Plenty of mystery series offer these; none are the 87^th Precinct.

My theory of the moment: It boils down to investment: Investment on the part of the author to populate his fictional city of Isola with a vibrant community of colorful characters. Investment on the part of readers to relate to these characters, enough so that like the police detectives of the 87^th, we are bothered when some evil is done them.

Knuckler: The Phil Niekro Story – Wilfrid Binette, 1970 ½★

A Pitch that Roared, a Book that Bored

Some sports books are like this one: Written on the fly to cash in on an athlete’s brief moment in the sun, certain in the knowledge no one will be reading it in a few years when said athlete’s time is long over.

I mean, this particular pitcher had just enjoyed his first big season, leading the Atlanta Braves to their first-ever postseason appearance, and he’s already 30 years old. How much longer would you think he had?

The Guns Of August – Barbara Tuchman, 1962 ★★★½

The Best-Laid Plans

Barbara Tuchman didn’t quite catapult history books into events, but she moved that ball forward in a big way. For several decades her heavy tomes about medieval warfare and Chinese diplomacy were best-sellers people lugged to the beach.

None had the impact of The Guns Of August, her 1962 account of the first month of World War I. It won the next year’s non-fiction Pulitzer and achieved legend status during the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy was said to quote from it often, tasking staff to read it as war with Russia loomed.

Dubliners – James Joyce, 1914 ★★★★★

The Stuff of Life

Short-story collections come in all types. Some are hodgepodges, some genre exercises, some focus on specific characters. Then there are the stories of Dubliners, connected by both a setting and something less a theme than a tone.

Call it a concept album in prose.

That is one of the amazing things about Dubliners, how James Joyce crafts a unified tone poem while the stories themselves traverse all kinds of territory. Not geographic territory – it’s all happening in Dublin – but territory of the soul.

A Shilling For Candles – Josephine Tey, 1936 ★★

Murder, She Shrugged

There is a certain type of mystery reader for whom the mystery itself is secondary. The mystery services a formula, follows a pattern, and provides background contrast to whatever aspect of the book it is the reader cares about. It is not taken seriously.

I don’t understand these kind of mystery readers, but they evidently exist in fair-enough number to promote the legacies of writers who cater to this approach. Which leads me to Josephine Tey.